The Rising Sun Athletic Association: A Hotel, a Family, and a Fastball

Before there were travel ball tournaments and elite showcases, before every kid’s at-bat was streamed on a phone, there were neighborhood athletic associations — volunteer-run, community-funded organizations that gave Reading’s kids a place to play and its adults a reason to cheer. And among all of them, none cast a longer shadow than the Rising Sun Athletic Association.

Its story begins not on a ball diamond, but inside a barroom.

The Hotel That Started It All

In 1940, a man named John Kramer Sr. — a mechanic-turned-hotel keeper who had changed his family’s fortunes by winning the Irish Sweepstakes — bought a hotel and taproom called the Rising Sun in Reading from a local brewery. The place sat near the busy Reading Railroad repair shops, drawing most of its clientele from the railyard workers who punched the clock nearby. It had 21 rooms upstairs — the bare minimum required by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board to hold a hotel license — and a bar downstairs that hummed with the kind of regular, working-class energy that defined mid-century Reading.

Rising Sun Hotel & Bar, 10th and Pike

But the Rising Sun was more than a watering hole. It was located near a city playground, and John Kramer’s eldest daughter, Ruth Kramer, became a regular there — playing baseball and softball “mostly with older kids,” as she later recalled. John Sr. sponsored a girls’ softball team called the Rising Sun Maids, with Ruth as pitcher. Coached by Charles Brahm and John Hospidor, the Maids practiced on a coal-dirt field next to a railroad siding and improved quickly. Ruth’s father even set up a daily pitching drill in a vacant lot across the street: he fastened a mattress to a tree, drew a strike zone circle, and made Ruth throw at it 50 times in a row — and if she missed on throw 35, she started over from zero.

Ruth Kramer

That intensity paid off. Ruth would go on to play in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League — the real-life league behind the movie A League of Their Own — suiting up for the Fort Wayne Daisies in 1946 and 1947. She later returned to Reading, pitched over 600 softball games with more than 250 victories, and coached the Reading High School girls’ softball program for 16 years, compiling a 217–73 record with two Berks County championships and three district titles.

In 1944, with World War II raging and the name “Rising Sun” carrying uncomfortable associations with Imperial Japan, the Maids briefly became the Piker Maids — though John Kramer Sr. kept sponsoring them.

The Rising Sun name endured.

John Kramer Jr. Builds an Association

John Kramer Jr. — Ruth’s younger brother, five years her junior, the same kid who used to watch her pitch at the mattress and gleefully announce every miss — bought the Rising Sun Hotel from his father in 1955. He would go on to serve as Berks County Sheriff for 20 years, earning bipartisan respect and friendships that extended into the highest levels of Philadelphia sports (Mike Schmidt, Pete Rose, and Gregg Luzinski all counted him as a friend).

But his most lasting local contribution came in 1965, when he founded the Rising Sun Athletic Association. Working alongside Forrest “Diz” Moyer — a 1948 Reading High School graduate, Korean War veteran, and devoted youth athletics man — Kramer built a volunteer organization that would become a cornerstone of Reading’s youth sports landscape.

Moyer served as the association’s charter president. A man whose obituary described him simply as “loyal and devoted to youth athletics in Reading,” Diz had already coached Legion baseball for Pulaski Post 929 and the Jackson Demos of the City-County Colt League before helping launch the Rising Sun. (He later moved to Harrisburg and co-founded the Paxton Pioneers Athletic Association, replicating the model he’d helped create in Reading.)

The Rising Sun Athletic Association sponsored bowling, baseball, basketball, and softball teams, giving kids and adults alike an organized outlet for competition and community. Over the decades, a long line of dedicated volunteers kept it running:

• Donald “Skip” Rahn served as head football coach for over 25 years, shaping generations of players from his base in Temple.
• Tony Zonca, the legendary Reading Eagle sportswriter who broke the story that Muhammad Ali was coming out of retirement in 1980, was a volunteer youth coach at Rising Sun in the 1970s and 1980s. He and his wife Banny would have players over for pizza parties or buy the team a meal before a big game.
• Barry Kulp, a Reading High School graduate and longtime Liberty Fire Company trustee, coached many youth leagues at Rising Sun.
• John Loeper coached baseball for the association and served as an assistant coach at Central Catholic.
• Randall “Buz” Dietrich served as president of the Rising Sun Athletic Association, along with his roles as Scout Master and active community leader.

These weren’t paid positions. These were Reading guys — firemen, newspaper men, factory workers, salesmen — who showed up because kids needed coaches and the neighborhood needed something to rally around.

Below: The Rising Sun Athletic Association Baseball at 11th and Pike Playground in Reading, PA.

The Sunners: World Champions from a Reading Barroom

But the crown jewel of the Rising Sun Athletic Association — the thing that put a Reading hotel’s name on the national and international sporting map — was its fast-pitch softball team: the Sunners.

Managed by the incomparable Rocky Santilli, the Sunners had been a solid regional team for years. But they lacked what Santilli later called “the horse who could take you where you needed to go.”

Rocky Santilli

That horse arrived in 1970. His name was Ty Stofflet.

Ty Stofflet

A left-handed pitcher from Coplay in Lehigh County, Stofflet had honed his craft with the Allentown Patriots and Sal’s Lunch of Philadelphia before joining the Sunners. His windmill fastball was eventually clocked at 104.7 miles per hour. He threw 58 perfect games, 172 no-hitters, and 650 shutouts over a career that produced more than 1,500 wins.

The Sunners’ first breakthrough came in 1970 at the Pennsylvania state fast-pitch tournament in Scranton. After losing their first game, they had to win seven straight to take the title. Stofflet won four games on Saturday and two more on Sunday. Heading into the bottom of the ninth of the championship with a one-run lead, teammate Barry Distasio passed Stofflet on the way to center field.

“He says to me, ‘We’re state champs,'” Distasio recalled. “I said, ‘Ty, we need three outs.’ He says, ‘We’re state champs.'”

Then he struck out three batters on nine pitches.

National Champions

The Sunners won ASA (Amateur Softball Association) national championships in 1975, 1977, and 1978.

The 1975 title run in the national tournament was a masterpiece. Rising Sun Hotel of Reading rallied for two runs in the bottom of the seventh to beat Aurora, Illinois, 4-3 and capture the title with a 6-0 tournament record. Stofflet pitched all six games, including an 18-inning, 1-0 shutout over Seattle in which he struck out 32. Across 55 innings, he struck out 88 and walked only six. He was named tournament MVP, and teammate Art Weida joined him on the All-American team. Other key players included Larry Bergh, Gordy Frack, and Zeke DeLong.

His greatest single year came in 1978: a 46-1 record with a 0.67 ERA, 661 strikeouts in 334 innings, and a 71-game winning streak spanning 1977–78.

World Co-Champions

Because of the 1975 national title, the Sunners were selected to represent the United States in the International Softball Federation tournament in New Zealand in February 1976.

What followed was arguably the greatest pitching performance in the history of fast-pitch softball.

Facing New Zealand and its ace Kevin Herlihy, Stofflet pitched 20 innings, carrying a perfect game into the 18⅔ inning before hitting a batter. He struck out 33, drove in the game’s only run with a single in the 20th inning, and had three other game-winning hits in the tournament. He was named both Most Valuable Pitcher and Most Valuable Player.

Heavy rain wiped out the rest of the tournament, and the Sunners shared the world title with Canada and New Zealand — but nobody who watched that 20-inning performance had any doubts about who the best team was.

Dodger Stadium and Dick Clark

The Sunners’ fame reached Hollywood. In 1978, Stofflet, catcher Carl Solarek, and Santilli traveled to Los Angeles to appear on “Dick Clark’s Live Wednesday Show” on ABC. At Dodger Stadium — the day after the Yankees beat the Dodgers in Game 6 of the World Series — Stofflet faced three Dodger stars: Reggie Smith, Davey Lopes, and Steve Yeager.

“They watched Ty warm up and said, ‘We’re not batting against him,'” Solarek recalled. “They were not in a good mood.”

Stofflet struck out Smith and Lopes (who had slugged three home runs in that World Series). Yeager managed a dribbler to third on a change-up, won a television for putting the ball in play, and raised his arms in triumph.

After the live broadcast, the Dodgers asked to hit against him again. “He struck out all three,” Solarek said. “No one touched the ball. They were in awe.”

Wherever Stofflet went, crowds followed. The Sunners drew 7,000 fans in Aurora, Illinois. On a trip to Canada, 5,500 came out on consecutive nights. He was featured in Sports Illustrated and The New York Times.

“Wherever Ty went, it was incredible,” Solarek said. “He would pack the place.”

The Changing Sponsors, the Enduring Name

Over the years, the Sunners’ jerseys changed as sponsors came and went — Billard Sunners, York Barbell Sunners, Reading Sunners, Bank of Pennsylvania Sunners, Allentown Sunners — but the core identity always traced back to the Rising Sun. The team was eventually based in Leesport, but its soul belonged to Reading.

Stofflet played for the Sunners from 1970 to 1986, then bounced to a few other clubs before retiring. He died on January 23, 2021, at age 79.

“His work ethic made him so good,” Solarek said. “He had a pitching mound in his basement and he would throw year round. He’d run to keep himself in shape. His stamina was just incredible. It was just his attitude. He wanted to win. There were pitchers as talented as he was, but when it came to his desire to win, no one could beat him.”

More Than Trophies

The Rising Sun Athletic Association wasn’t just about championships and fastballs clocked at 104 miles per hour. It was about the Skip Rahns coaching football for 25 years because kids in the neighborhood needed a coach. It was about Tony Zonca buying the team pizza before a big game. It was about Diz Moyer and John Kramer building something from a hotel and a handshake in 1965 that would shape the lives of thousands of Reading kids.

As late as 2023, Reading’s City Council recognized the Rising Sun Athletic Association alongside the Boy Scouts of America and Reading Little League as organizations that had historically used the city’s public parks for youth programming.

It all started in a 21-room hotel near the Reading Railroad shops, where a man fastened a mattress to a tree and told his daughter to throw strikes.

Sources: U.S. Congressional Record (October 25, 2000); Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) biography of Ruth Kramer Hartman by Brian Engelhardt; Reading Eagle obituaries and reporting by Rich Scarcella; The Morning Call; Softball History USA; Pleasant Valley Lost by Joseph J. Swope; Reading Eagle: 150 Years of News.